


break me anew

by babyimpalas



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, M/M, Pre-canon to mid season 1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-01
Updated: 2019-05-01
Packaged: 2020-02-15 19:06:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18675673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/babyimpalas/pseuds/babyimpalas
Summary: In the beginning, Sam breaks his heart.In the end, Dean mends it all on his own





	break me anew

In the beginning, Sam breaks his heart.

In the end, Dean mends it all on his own.

 

* * * 

 

Sam leaves them on a Tuesday night. There’s nothing special about this night; it is just like any other. There is no crackling thunder in the dark sky, no pouring rain. It is a night with a clear summer sky and thousands of twinkling stars.

The inside of Dean’s mind is another matter entirely. It is dark and violently twisted, betrayal and anger and  _ longing _ just writhing to beat out of their cage, but he pushes it all down and doesn’t speak a word.

When Sam leaves, he takes Dean’s heart with him.

Dean lets him.

And Dean lets him go.

 

* * *

 

The silence between the remaining Winchester men is suffocating, choking the breath out of Dean at times, and yet they carry on with as much dignity as they can afford. John Winchester is a good man, Dean knows, but he is not always a good father. He let Sam go, and for that Dean will never forgive him.

Dean let Sam go, and for that he will never forgive himself.

 

* * *

His skin feels stretched thin, and weariness settles on his shoulders like it has carved itself a new home there. The silence between them is filled with bitterness and the space Sam left behind remains hollow.

When John suggests going on separate hunts, Dean doesn’t put up a fight.

Sam left him, so John will leave him too.

Sam is his father’s son.

Dean wonders if his mother ever felt the emptiness carve into her hollow chest too.

 

 

* * *

Sam was his entire world, and with him gone, he feels off-kilter, like the earth has shifted beneath his very feet.

When he was four, his mother placed a tiny little bundle in his arms and called it brother.

When he was four, his mother burned on the ceiling and he carried his brother out of hellfire.

_ Take your brother outside and go. _

He used to kiss little Sammy goodnight on the forehead, causing him to erupt in giggles and swat at his face with his grubby hands.

Sammy became Sam and clouds gathered in his face, and Dean poured his very being into what Sam needed him to be.

_ Brother, father, mother. _

He never quite figured out who he was without Sam shadowing in his footsteps.

_ Take care of Sammy. _

Without Sam there, Dean doesn’t know who to be.

He keeps hunting.

 

* * *

In Nebraska, Dean ends up in the hospital with a broken collarbone. He calls his father, tells him of his injury, daring him to berate him, to come to him, to  _ care _ . John Winchester tells him to get better and speaks of another hunt miles away.

Dean doesn’t mind, not really.

His father may be waging war against a demon in his wife’s name, but Dean saves people in his mother’s memory.

Most days it’s enough for him.

 

* * *

Cassie isn’t different, not really.

It is Dean who is different when he is with her.

He dares to dream of change, of love, of coming home to someone who knows the truth of him and accepts him. Cassie reminds him of Sam.

He has always been too wrapped up in his little brother.

Dreams aren’t for people like him.

He leaves and doesn’t look back.

 

* * *

After Cassie, he doesn’t dare get close to people.

_ Save people, hunt things, get the fuck out of dodge. _

He meets girl in skeezy bars and takes them back to his hotel room sometimes. He feeds them some fantasy, weaving a web of lies about who he is, and doesn’t feel guilty. They’re not looking for the truth, not really. They want the fantasy. He doesn’t mind being the escape for them. 

On one memorable occasion, he takes a guy to the alley behind a bar in a college town. Nick, or something. He is fresh faced, looking at Dean like he has never seen anything more magnificent. Nick kisses him tentatively, then harder when Dean doesn’t stop him. He twines his fingers in Dean’s hair and nuzzles his jaw, the gesture oddly intimate for an encounter like this. Dean lets him, because it is the only thing holding him upright in the moment.

Afterwards, he says goodbye to the boy, putting his clothes back on like armour slotting into place. He doesn’t look back, but he can feel eyes on his back. He could go back, he knows, and he will be welcomed.

Dean keeps walking.

 

* * *

Three years pass without any word from Sam.

He thinks about calling his brother, but talks himself out of it instantly. Sam is ridding himself of his shames, and his family has always been the rust tainting Sam’s gleaming white armor.

He indulges the thought of check on him from afar, but what if Sam sees? Dean cannot bear the look of fear on his little brother’s face.

Fear, of him, of Dean. Fear that Dean would mess up Sam’s apple-pie normal world, a world that Dean has no place in.

It is criminally, heartbreakingly easy to talk himself out of that one too.

 

* * *

 

Dean hunts, Dean kills, and Dean wanders.

He stays in motels with moth-eaten wallpapers and eats in diners where everybody knows everybody. The faces become blurs and the places all turn into specks of dust in his rearview mirror.

There are men, and there are women, and he feels like he leaves a little bit of his heart with every single one of them. He wonders about the day when there will be nothing left of him.

The life of a hunter is a lonely one. Lonely and inevitable in its ending.

 

* * *

When John Winchester goes missing, Dean drives to his little brother.

Sam is so beautiful it hurts, his baby brother easily overpowering him in close combat, and that thought shouldn’t make him as proud as it does.

But Sam has a life now, a life that he made all on his own. He has a girlfriend who loves him, and a future that doesn’t have any place for his big brother. 

Dean promises himself this will be it, one last hurrah before he finally lets Sam go.

Turns out it doesn’t work that way. 

Their life is forged anew in flames.

 

* * *

 

In the aftermath, Sam is like a man possessed. He eats, he sleeps, and he hunts. Dean doesn’t feel at unease by his side, but he knows he should. 

Time will heal all wounds, he keeps telling himself.

He doesn’t even believe his own lies.

Sam is his father’s son.

 

* * *

 

The search for their father continues, but they help people along the way. They find their rhythm again, finding where they each fit in in this new life of theirs.

He can feel Sam looking at him sometimes, something strange and dark in his eyes that are hidden behind easy smiles the moment Dean looks back. This Sam is a stranger to him, and he longs for the days when his little brother looked up to him, loved him the most of anyone. He feels ashamed for wishing this Sam gone, when he himself brought him back in this life, but no one has ever called him a righteous man. 

He turns up the volume of the music blaring out of speakers and taps his fingers on the steering wheel. 

 

* * *

 

Sam shoots him full of rock salt, cursing him for dragging him away from sunshine and laughter and into pain and death. Dean doesn’t even have the strength to counter his accusations. He may not have lit the match, but he sure turned off the sprinklers. 

He brings Sam out of his possessed state and when his little brother offers him halted apologies, he waves them off with a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes.

Sam may not have intended to say them out loud, but he must have thought of them often enough for the spirit to latch on. 

It doesn’t hurt as much as he thought it would, and that’s somehow worse than anything he’s ever felt.

 

* * *

 

Dean has weeks to live. He takes it better than Sam does.

He is at peace, he is startled to realize, but watching Sam clench his jaw and refuse to even entertain the possibility of him dying is devastating.

He agrees to see the faith healer to indulge his little brother, but it actually works.

When he finds out lives had been traded for his, he gasps and dry heaves, clinging to the corner of the bed frame in their cheap motel room.

They kill the reaper, and Lyla is still at death’s door.

Sam doesn’t look like he regrets it. Sam looks like he will trade hundred lives just to keep him by his side.

It is almost frightening.

Almost.

But not quite. 

 

* * *

 

After they leave Cassie, Dean feels his brother studying him intently. Sam has been like this for the entire hunt, watching Dean with Cassie, something indecipherable in his eyes.

“What, Sam?” He finally snaps when the silence becomes too stifling in the car.

Sam doesn’t speak for a moment and when he does, his voice is whisper soft, “How many have there been?”

Dean tells him the truth, he has nothing to hide. “Too many.”

“Do you ever remember their names?”

“A few.”

A beat and then, “Tell me.”

Now Dean looks at him and almost gasps at what he sees. Sam is staring at him, transfixed, the hue of dusk painting his face in shadows, and he looks like he is dreading whatever answer Dean may have for him.

He contemplates lying, and then gives up. Let Sam have his truth and be done with it. Dean is bone-weary exhausted.

“Lisa. Cassie,” Dean pauses for just one moment and continues as if he had never stopped, “Nick. Reminded me a little of you.”

He means that as a joke, a way to soften the surprise, but Sam stiffens beside him, the line of his body going rigid, and he clenches his jaw and looks out the window.

They don’t speak another word for the whole ride.

 

* * *

 

They’re in their motel rooms, a run down cheap building in the middle of nowhere, and Dean feels suffocated. He tugs at the collar of his worn-soft t-shirt restlessly, and tries to breathe underwater. Sam still hasn’t spoken a word.

“You okay?” He finally asks when he can’t take the silence anymore, and Sam looks up from his ever present beloved laptop.

“Peachy,” Sam replies, with a sort of undertone that implies nothing is peachy at all.

He nods, and then waits a minute, because Sam is nothing if not a giant fucking girl about his feelings. Somewhat detachedly, he wonders if it’s the Nick thing that’s thrown Sam off or if it’s the careless comment about their resemblance, but no, Sam is not an asshole of that magnitude. 

Sure enough, after a minute or two or a fucking century, Sam slaps the lid of his laptop down with a slam and looks up at him. “You never said you liked men.”

“Men, women, they’re all people,” he dismisses somewhat casually, staring at his little brother, daring him to be a dick.

“If I’d known -” Sam starts, and then stops, rubbing a hand across his face. “If I’d known, I’d have done something.”

And suddenly, Dean is furious.

“What’d you have done, Sam? You weren’t there, you left. And that’s fine, I’m proud of you and all that, but don’t you dare patronize me.”

“ _Patronize_ you?” Sam laughs loudly, but there is something hysteric in that sound and Dean is immediately even more on the edge, “No, I’m not patronizing you, I’m saying if I’d known I liked it, I’d have taken you with me to Stanford.”

“Sam, what the -”

“No one would know us there, Dean,” Sam says, advancing on him with a dangerous glint in his eyes, “We could have been anything. _Anyone_.”

“I don’t -”

“You don’t know, Dean, you _never_ do.”

Dean backs up, suddenly unsure of where this is going. Sam looks dangerous, almost feral, and he has never seen this version of his brother before. He holds a hand out, palm pushing against the hulking mass of little brother, but Sam keeps crowding him in and there’s nowhere for him to go. 

When Sam kisses him, teeth catching on his bottom lip and drawing blood, Dean absurdly thinks of that one time when they were kids and Sam bit his arm because he thought Dean should have been playing with him instead of chatting with Dana across the hall. But that thought fades into nothing as Sam slides his fingers into the hair at his nape and then Dean thinks of nothing at all.

“You don’t know, Dean, but you _will_.”

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Baby's first ever wincest fic! First ever supernatural fic, more like. I've been in the fandom for years, just lurking about, but I've finally decided to venture into the world of fan fiction for this fandom. Let me know if y'all like? Any constructive criticism is welcome! And every read, kudos, and comment mean the world to me!
> 
> Cheers,  
> Sapphire xx


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